Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
imal welfare will lose many potential advocates if nothing less than highly demanding
personal measures are demanded and made. Ergo: evaluated as a form of protest
against existing conditions, tentative veganism is counterproductive to liberationism
and, through that, detrimental to animal welfare.
The problem with this last antivegan argument is that the same criticism can be
made against vegetarians by “demivegetarians” (people who eat meat only rarely).
Demivegetarians will claim that vegetarianism demands too much and is counterpro-
ductive relative to their own milder form of protest. Against demivegetarians it should
be pointed out that the difference between eating flesh and eating eggs is that both
vegetarians and tentative vegans agree that the latter is essentially moral, whereas the
former is not. “Essential” here means that for vegetarians, unlike eating eggs, under
no conditions is it moral to kill an animal for the purpose of eating it when nutri-
tional alternatives are available. Demivegetarianism is thus perhaps strategically
prudential, but, like occasional molesting, it constitutes participation in a morally
wrong act and is hence unjustified, whereas vegetarians that selectively eat eggs and
dairy participate in a move forward.
Against this, tentative vegans will say that eating eggs may not be “essentially”
wrong, but exploitation is an essential wrong, and that participating as a consumer
with acts of lesser exploitation is still essentially wrong. To return to the analogy
with slavery, abolitionism too no doubt appeared overdemanding, but the personal
price a reform may exert cannot be a plausible objection to its moral standing. Doing
the right thing is sometimes tough. Tentative vegans and vegetarians thus diverge rad-
ically in the way they describe consumption of free-roaming animal-derived products,
and both seem to be correct: buying and eating such products can be described either
as supporting reform or as supporting fig-leaf exploitation, and nothing in the actions
themselves favors one of these descriptions.
This descriptive, or hermeneutic, dimension of the debate strikes me as unfruitful
because nothing in the act turns one of these competing descriptions into a misde-
scription. On the other hand, the
political
considerations that underlie which of these
descriptions one should prefer lead to a less aporetic stance. Political reform move-
ments have faced the moral problem of cooperating with partial, nonsatisfactory re-
form steps many times. Feminism shows, for example, how step-by-step cooperation
with partial improvements paved the way to radical reform. Urging women not to
vote in the first election in which they were allowed to do so on the basis of
protesting against the patriarchal system as such (or because women were not yet
themselves eligible candidates) would have damaged the feminist cause. Recognition
of the imperfection of an improvement does not necessarily entail banning coopera-
